The essay explores memory, tacit knowledge, and time in relation to place. It aims to uncover insights into working with place and proposes a method of rupture and pause as a conceptual technique for addressing personal and collective narratives of trauma. Following a folkloric tradition of place and landscape as an embodiment of collective sadness, the essay seeks to find an intuitively driven framework for mapping of memory within imaginary spatial objects and sites. The essay utilises the ground plane as a metaphor for the present and the tangible, treating the act of ‘the dig’ as poetic instrument for the imaginary and temporal implementation within the essay. The ground is an essential dependency of metaphysics, and the text plays on this in a literal and material sense, using motifs of bogs, mires and unstable terrain. The subject of the essay is situated predominately within an Irish context of folklore and recent history. The essay is a testimony to the joy and the pain of working with place and how one is embroiled into the process subconsciously.